Odyssey of the Mind team takes 2nd at worlds

Novo Restoration Odyssey of the Mind places 2nd in world finals through creative problem-solving

By Shelley Widhalm

Reporter-Herald Staff Writer

Posted:
06/24/2014 09:07:36 PM MDT

Every time the Novo Restoration Odyssey of the Mind team heads to the world finals, the members want to win, of course, but they also have a larger goal.

At the end of May, they came close to their first goal by taking second place during the Odyssey of the Mind 2014 World Finals, the same ranking they earned last year. They placed in the top 10 over the last four years of the six years they have competed at the regional, state and international levels.

Their second goal was to make people think and feel, said Marty Janssen, co-coach of the team with Sean Johnson.

"They do things that are different than other teams," Janssen said. "They commit themselves from the start of the year to deliver a performance that is mature, memorable and touches people and meets the required aspects of the problem in unique ways."

This year, the Novo Restoration team competed at Iowa State University in Aims against more than 836 teams worldwide after taking first place in both the state and regional competitions in April and March respectively. The team members come from Bill Reed Middle School and include rising ninth-graders Colton Attrell, Izze Johnson, Emme Janssen and Kaelan Ramirez and rising eighth-grader Maya Bontrager.

Next year, the team will move out of the middle school division, or division 2, to compete in division 3 for high school students.

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Each level of the competition from regional to worlds encourages students from kindergarten through college to use their creativity to prepare for and solve long-term problems and to create solutions to spontaneous problems given on the spot. The students work in teams to solve one of five long-term problems that have technical, artistic, humorous or classical themes, creating an eight-minute skit to demonstrate their answers.

This year, the Novo Restoration Odyssey of the Mind team, which is sponsored by Novo Restoration in Loveland, selected a problem called the Not-So-Haunted House. The students, competing against 66 other teams, created a pop-up-style, not-so-haunted house with four special effects that are intended to scare others but instead produce a different result.

"It's just having the guts to take on more profound topics," Janssen said. "They want to be the team that people remember."

The Novo Restoration team chose life for their haunted environment, focusing on one boy's life as he encounters scary moments and has to make important decisions when handling peer pressure, asking a girl out, taking a job in Afghanistan and working through the after-effects of a car crash. They demonstrated how one decision leads to the next, ending with a brain operation that causes the boy to lose his memories.

"He could see how he lives his life because through the brain operation he forgot everything," Izze said.

The team members wanted to show how decisions can affect people's lives and make things scary for them, Emme said.

"I get the sense you like the challenge of making people think about life and the world around them," Janssen said to the team members. "I get the sense you like to make people feel something and think about the world."

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